Grafana & Flux
New Flux support in Grafana
Jacob Lisi
@JacobLisi

TL;DR
● Flux is powerful
● You can start playing with Flux in Grafana today
○ Flux support in Grafana is available via a new datasource
plugin
● For now, no automated way to migrate dashboards
○ Transpiler for Influx queries is being worked on
○ You can migrate your dashboards and panels manually

Flux Design Goals
● Decouple language from the execution
engine
○ Execution engine takes a DAG of transformations
○ Transpilers: Flux, Influx Query, PromQL
● Decouple database from query computation
○ Iterate faster on query engine
○ Keep database untouched
○ Independently scalable
● Add more functions
○ Chainable: transformation from input table to
output table

Flux recap
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)

Flux recap: Select one value from a table
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> max() // Selector

Flux primer: Window-chunk and aggregate
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“_measurement”] == “cpu”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> window(every: 10m)
|> mean() // Aggregator
|> filter(fn: (r) => r._value > 1) // Having

Flux query planning
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> max()
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> max()
● Same plan DAG

Flux query planning gotchas
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> max()
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> max() // Selector function returns 1 record
|> range(start: -1h)
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“_value”] > 1) // Full table scan

User defined functions
select = (db=”telegraf”, m, f) => {
return from(db:db)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r._measurement == m
and r._field == f)
}
select(m: “cpu”, f: “usage_user”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)

Chainable user defined functions
myFilter = (m, f, table=<-) => {
return table
|> filter(fn: (r) => r._measurement == m
and r._field == f)
}
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> myFilter(m: “cpu”, f: “usage_user”)
|> range(start: -1h)

Flux StdLib
https://github.com/influxdata/flux/tree/master/stdlib

Math on tables
cpu = from(db)...
CpuRequests = from(db)...
join(
tables: {cpu: cpu, req: CpuRequests},
fn: (t) => t.cpu._value / t.req._value
) // Implicit join on time

New response format: CSV

Getting Started With Flux
● Run latest influxd
○ https://portal.influxdata.com/downloads
○ Update your influxdb.conf to include
● Generate data
○ Telegraf
# ...
[http]
# ...
flux-enabled = true
# ...

Get started: Grafana datasource
● Get Grafana 5.3+
● Install Flux datasource plugin
○ https://github.com/grafana/influxdb-flux-datasource
○ Clone into your grafanas data/plugins
○ Restart Grafana
● Add your Flux datasource
● Add a dashboard
● Add a panel

Demo
https://github.com/jtlisi/grafana_flux_demo

Datasource feature summary
● Syntax highlighting, tab completion, raw table preview
● Inline function documentation
● $range variable

Datasource feature summary
● Shortcodes
● Template variables with
helper functions
○ measurements()
○ field_keys()
○ tags()
○ tag_values()
● Annotations

Roadmap
● Alerting
● UI improvements
● Improve Query Shortcuts
● Transitioning to a default plugin
● Dashboard Migrations?

Thanks for listening!
Questions?
@JacobLisi